Important information for grownups about YouTube Kids

YouTube Kids was built from the ground up to be a fun, family-friendly place for kids and families. The YouTube Kids app includes both popular children's videos and diverse new content, delivered in a way that's easy to use for children of any age.

Before your child gets started, there are a few things we want to make sure you understand:

YouTube Kids profiles

YouTube Kids allows signed in parents to create a separate profile for each kid in their household. Each profile has a separate set of viewing preferences and recommendations, allowing multiple kids to get the most out of the YouTube Kids app.

These profiles are available on any device where the parent is signed in and the YouTube Kids app is installed. You can have up to eight profiles. Learn how to create a profile.

One option is to allow your child to explore all videos on YouTube Kids. Parents can choose between 3 age-based content settings:

Preschool (Ages 4 & under)

Younger (Ages 5-7)

Older (Ages 8-12)

Our automated systems select content from the broader universe of videos on YouTube. We work hard to exclude content that’s not suitable for kids, but we can’t manually review all videos and no automated system is perfect. If you find something inappropriate, you can block it or report it for fast review.

Another option is to handpick the content your child has access to yourself (Approve Content Yourself). If you choose this option, your child won’t be able to search. For more information on how to implement this option, please refer to the YouTube Kids guide to parental controls and settings.

Pick the option that you think is best for your child. You can change these settings at any time. We also offer a variety of tools and settings, described below, that you can use to further control your child's experience. Learn more about parental controls and settings.

Search

When you turn Search on, you allow your child to find and watch the millions of videos available in YouTube Kids. These videos are made available in the app only after being selected by a special algorithm designed to return relevant and appropriate results.

Videos available through Search, however, are not subject to human review. YouTube handles tremendous breadth, depth and scale of content -- so while we work hard to get it right, your child may sometimes find content in the app that you may not want them to watch.

If you would like to restrict your child’s experience to a more limited set of content you can turn off Search using parental settings. By turning search off, your child will only have access to channels that have been verified by YouTube Kids. Please keep in mind that regardless of the status of Search in your app, there is always a chance that your child will find content that you don’t want them to watch.

Note: When you turn Search off, your Watch and Search history will be cleared, as well as Recommended and Watch it again videos.

In addition to turning off Search, YouTube Kids offers additional parental controls to help you choose the right experience for your child. Learn more about parental controls and settings.

Videos on the home screen

Videos on the home screen are grouped into categories, such as “Shows,” “Music,” etc. YouTube Kids may periodically introduce temporary categories such as “Reading” to celebrate reading month, for instance. These videos are selected by the app using a specially trained algorithm and some human review. These may be ranked based on what your child has watched or searched. These videos represent only a subset of the millions of videos available in YouTube Kids.

If you have chosen the “Approved content only” setting, your child will only see one category on their home screen containing the content you handpicked, called “Approved for you”.

Recommended videos

Recommended videos are selected by our algorithm and are not always subject to human review. Recommended videos show both when Search is on or off, and are generally presented as an additional category on the home screen after multiple videos have been watched in YouTube Kids. Recommended videos may also appear in the four categories of videos on the home screen and as suggestions for your child to watch after they’ve watched videos on the home screen or they’ve searched for a video. Recommended videos are based on what has been watched or searched in the app and always draw from the complete set of videos that are available in YouTube Kids.

You can reset Recommended videos by clearing the app's history in parental settings. Note that when you turn search off, Recommended videos will be cleared as well as your watch and search history.

When Pause history is on (you can turn it on or off in parental settings), you will stop the app from using new videos you watch or terms you search for to influence your Recommended videos.

If your child's profile is set to Approved content only, Recommended videos are drawn only from content you’ve approved for your child. Learn more about Recommended videos.

Watch it again

Watch it again allows your child to choose from videos previously watched in the app.

You can reset Watch it again videos by clearing the app's history in parental settings. Note that when you turn search off, your Watch it again videos will be cleared, as well as your watch and search history.

When Pause history is on (you can turn it on or off in parental settings), you will stop the app from using new videos you watch or terms you search for to influence your Watch it again videos.

We allow limited paid advertisements (“Paid Ads”) in the app so that we can offer it for free. When your child plays a video in the app, your child may see a Paid Ad, which would be marked with “Ad” and preceded by an ad intro. These Paid Ads must follow our advertising policies, which for example exclude certain categories like food and beverages. Learn more about Ads in YouTube Kids and our advertising policies.

Videos uploaded by users are not Paid Ads so they are not subject to our advertising policies regardless of the nature of the content. Users often upload commercials and other promotional materials to their YouTube channels, and these videos may appear in the app. For example, a search for cookies may show a television commercial from a cookie company on a user’s channel -- we would not consider this video a Paid Ad and it would not be subject to our advertising policies, which disallow Paid Ads for food.

If you would like to watch videos free of paid ads with your child, try the YouTube Kids App withYouTube Premium. Learn more.

Collection and use of information and personal data on YouTube Kids

For complete information about our data practices, please see the YouTube Kids Privacy Notice which you can find at kids.youtube.com/t/privacynotice or in the app's Settings, under the Privacy section.

We take precautions to protect the privacy of the users of our app. It's important that the parent or legal guardian of the child that will be using the app reads this before the child gets started. If you are not the parent or legal guardian of the child that will be using YouTube Kids, or if you are but you do not agree with our privacy practices, please do not allow the child to use the app.

This app is operated by Google LLC, with address at 1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States.